Alex Danchev. Cezanne: A Life. Pantheon, 2012.
It's often loose and can feel like a collection of anecdotes, but then there's something appropriate about letting incidents hang free as disconnected brushstrokes rather than plaster it all with narrative contour.
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Gerald Murnane. Inland. (1989).
A lovely X-ray of provincial childhood, wrapped in metafictional padding to which I was often indifferent but that sometimes carried off the magic trick as intended.
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Anonymous, H. Jay Harris (trans). The Tales of Ise. Tuttle Publishing, 1972 (伊勢物語, 1900).
I think this must be the despair of translators. Even the short prose passages seem to imply the difficulty of poetry.
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2018

Lydia Kiesling. The Golden State. MCD, 2018.
One possible structuralist diagram of the novel would plot an observation function against an invention function. This book is very strong on observation, and draws from its topics (economic precarity, female labor) an urgency that is fiction's particular province, and saves it from becoming another "Sebaldian" book of quasi-journalism.
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Jenny Erpenbeck. Gehen, ging, gegangen. (2015).
Wrapping a very live political issue in the book makes it more polemic and sentimental than Heimsuchung, and less realized as a novel; that said, it's still really good, since it's Erpenbeck.
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James M. Cain. Mildred Pierce. Vintage, 1941.
That Balzacian core of profit-driven energy. It's interesting that she's an entrepreneur; part of the book still wants to punish her for being a bad mother, but the rest of it has its sights on stranger things.
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Gérard de Nerval, Kléber Haedens (preface). Les filles du feu, suivi de Aurélia. Livre de poche, 1968.Aurélia probably stands next to Akutagawa's Cogwheels as an account of mental breakdown that draws its force from the powers of description having kept marvelously intact.
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Giorgio Bassani. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Harcourt, Inc., 1977 (ll giardino dei Finzi-Contini, 1962).
Wrenching and masterful. A novel that deals with its historical burden by getting the history out of the way on the first page, so that the drone note sounds through the rest of the novel doing its novelistic business.
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Hanne Orstavik. Love. Archipelago, 2018 (Kjærlighet, 1997).
The diffuse menace of the prose is quite something, but it’s too bad that it resolves to another cautionary tale about a bad mother, and that the character with imagination takes the punishment.
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Jenny Erpenbeck. Heimsuchung. , 2008.
Spirit of Büchner: those same clean cuts in the prose whether she's going minute by minute or year by year. I regret that I didn't start reading her considerably earlier.
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Domenico Starnone. Trick. Europa Editions, 2018 (2016).
There ought to be more such improvisations on “The Jolly Corner.” This one sets a bar for reckoning with artistic failure (or mediocrity), complete with infuriating grandkid.
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Li He, Paul Rouzer (preface), J.D. Frodsham (trans). The Collected Poems of Li He (Calligrams)..
As poems these versions don't come up to David Hinton or A.C. Graham, but the notes are excellent, and there's value in seeing Li He complete, with more conventional poems alongside the exotic anthology standards--though one has the sense they might appear less conventional if translated by a different hand.
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Hilary Mantel. The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. 4th Estate, 2014.
She's a fine writer when she hits on a worthy subject; the title story is top form. Too much casual cruelty in many of the others.
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Texts and images copyright (C) 2013 Paul Kerschen. Layout adapted from the Single A Tumblr theme by businessbullpen. The Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) has zygodactylic feet, leaving X-shaped tracks with ambiguous direction. The Pueblo and Hopi used the X symbol to mislead evil spirits. Border folklore in the early twentieth century held that a roadrunner would lead a lost traveler back to his path. In Mexico the roadrunner is known as paisano, countryman.